French Filmmaker Sees Light In `Amelie'

November 17, 2001|By Roger Moore, Sentinel Staff Writer

Montmartre, the magical hill overlooking Paris, is a great place to go if you want to stuff yourself on crepes, visit the campy Moulin Rouge show club or Lapin Agile cabaret, or get a sketch of yourself drawn on the spot. Chances are, you'll see a few tourists there.

But not in Amelie. In French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet's comedy-fantasy, Montmartre has "no cars, no dog (poop), no tourists," he says, in heavily-accented English. "OK, I cheat. Actually, I created a completely fake Montmartre. We worked a lot to get it to look that clean."

And the oddball characters who people this version of "the painters' hill" of Paris, the hypochondriac tobacconist, the brittle-boned painter, the obsessed jilted lover?

"Montmartre is where I live, next to the cafe in the movie," Jeunet says from Paris. "Believe me, there are a lot of strange people. Stranger than those we put in the movie."

When he teamed with fellow filmmaker Marc Caro, Jeunet was known for making dark, twisted and funny little fantasies such as Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. With Amelie, he has crossed over to the light side and made a movie about a sweet young Frenchwoman who gently and comically interferes in the lives of those around her.

Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal calls Amelie "a visual tour de force that looks like everyone's idealized notion of Paris: No crowds, no dirt, no traffic," a film "bound to capture American hearts and imaginations."

USA Today's Claudia Puig finds Amelie "irresistibly endearing."

But not all have embraced the lighter side of Jeunet. A few British critics have lamented his leaving the darkness. Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian described Amelie as "like being forced to eat up the entire sweet trolley in Maxim's in 60 seconds."

"What can I say, they are right," Jeunet says, laughing. "I cannot complain about the criticism that the movie is sunny, or that I have not made another dark, dark film, because it is true. I worked for that.

"This is a film that I have wanted to make for a long time. I began to plan this when I was 20, in Paris. But I couldn't make this when I worked with Marc Caro, because it is so personal, so emotional. We are not brothers, like the Coens or the Tavianis. We are not as close."

Jeunet, 48, parted with Caro, his partner for his first two films, when he directed the last Alien sequel. And Jeunet decided after Alien: Resurrection that it was time to lighten up.

"I did three dark films before. I don't want to do the same thing all my life."

He's quick to acknowledge the tricks he repeats from film to film. The squish-faced comic Dominique Pinon turns up in all his works. And Jeunet often finds an excuse to make sex both comical and musical; moans and squeaking bedsprings become symphonic.

"I do that because I am that way," he says with a laugh. "Sex is musical!"

His films are often collections of disparate, interconnected characters. That is why Amelie started with a collection of `magic' stories.

"Then, I had this nightmare of a mess to write one story and make it fit with the others," he says. "I spent four or five months, just trying to find the concept. The story of the woman `helping' other people was just one small story of many. Then, one morning, I don't know why, I thought, `Why not make her the center?' After that, everything was easy. When we had the center, with the story of the woman, all the anecdotes, the other stories, were magnets, drawn to her."

He found his helpful meddler, his Amelie, (Audrey Tautou) in another French film, Venus Beaute (Institut).

"I saw the big eyes, the ears, and I thought, `This is what Amelie should look like.' I shot a screen test and she looked perfect. I put the test in the DVD, so one day, you will see it. She was stunning."

Tautou is earning comparisons to another gamin Audrey, Audrey Hepburn. But, fess up here, Jeunet. Are the French coquette's eyes really that black?

"Audrey is no special effect. She is real. Those eyes are real. She's a real person with really, really black eyes. I promise."